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Sat, 13 Dec 2008 @ 17:27 || Busy week || WorkHad the company xmas party on Weds. The restaurant we went to was really good. I'll probably go back there around New Years with the whole family. Sukki didn't want to go, so it was just Shane and I. Shane has been working odd hours, mainly weekends, doing system administration tasks.Thursday was the CRUG xmas meeting. Pretty much like most of the CRUG's but had more gifts to hand out. This is a bimonthly meeting we host. We get a small gang of regulars. Elyse and I ended up talking with one of them till near 9:40ish. We could probably have talked all night. Friday night we caught up on all the tivo'ed shows we'd missed on Weds and Thurs. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Tue, 09 Dec 2008 @ 20:02 || Party || WorkThis year is the first year we're having an official company party.Taking everyone to the Texas de Brazil I'm flying my Toronto sales team in just for the event. We had a record breaking year. Should be a fun night. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Tue, 22 Jul 2008 @ 18:57 || National Hammock day || WorkWoot! I was fighting with a raid array all weekend, I had thought I lost alot of data, which is not something I was happy with. After working at a client's most of the day, I went back into the office and started working at the problem again.I saw woot! not only for hammock day, which I'm missing, but for the fact things are looking promissing. I have a SATA to USB cable, I tried to use this to recover the data this weekend, but it didn't help. Now I'm using it in conjunction with a Data Recovery Tool, and it's finding pretty much everything I thought I lost. I have 4 drives to recover and it looks like it will be about 3 hours each, so it's going to be a long night. Also, WOOT is a great little company. They have nothing to do with hammocks or data restores. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment Mon, 23 Jun 2008 @ 13:53 || PC fun || WorkThis Saturday I spend most of the day upgrading computers in the office. I had Shane and one of my nephews, Ji Ho, with me, I had them doing most of the work, Shane's built a few computers with me before, and I had him showing Ji Ho, how to do stuff. I had purchased enough parts from NewEgg to build two complete computers minus the cases.I had six cases in the back room all in various stages of disrepair. The plan was to salvage the best two cases, build two servers, save all the spare parts using them to build how ever many computers we could. Turns out that was zero. We had 4 left over motherboards and CPUs, tons of left over hard drives, CD, DVD and floppy drives, but very little left over memory, no left over power supplies and no graphic cards. A trip to best buy to get 1 of each missing part so we could at least build one spare took care of that. Of the two servers.. We used the best two cases, they kinda look alike.. When it was time to button them up, we found that we didn't have the side panels for one of the cases. Next weekend I'll get some fiberglass and make my own sides for it. Might make 2 sets and get rid of the sides of the other PC two. I had Shane install CentOS on them, but linux didn't like the RAID settings. We ran out of time, so I'll have to look at this again next week. For the extra part PC... The kids couldn't find the memory I had just bought at Best Buy. I had them search the office and the van, no luck. I drove back to Best Buy, luckily it's not too far, under 5 miles, while they continued putting things together. Once back at Best Buy, I had to wait in line for customer service, I explained what happened to the same guy who helped me find the memory just an hour or so before. He checked with the cashiers, found the memory at once of the checkouts, but had to run an inventory to make sure it was the one I paid for. Took them a few minutes, which was annoying, then the manager came out, handed me the memory and apologized. The kids finished up with the spare PC, and went to power it on to install an OS, no power... I checked and sure enough, bad power supply. At this time, it was after 6pm and we'd been in the office all day, so I called it quits for the weekend. We'll start up again next Saturday. Yesterday, I was in the office, and I picked up the bad power supply and returned it, figured better return it now, if I waited a week, Best Buy might be difficult with the return. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Wed, 18 Jun 2008 @ 18:39 || Apology || WorkOne of my previous posts bothered one of my employees, which I was surprise to find, read this blog. I had thought they just humored me when they said they read it.I apologize, I did not mean to imply that I was concerned about any of my current staff. I will try to keep my blog less work related and more like the "Farty Chair" post. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Sun, 08 Jun 2008 @ 09:39 || RSDC day 4 (last day) || WorkThree of us were alive enough to head to the conference hotel around 9:30. We ran into one of the IBMers who are responsible for part of the technical content. We had a great discussion with him and got a little insider info.After doing our surveys, some reason we all had 'employee surveys', to get our T-shirts, we headed to the closing ceremonies. As usual they gave out awards and prizes, at first it seemed all the winners had slept in or didn't show up, as you have to be present to win, but as they went on they seemed to have better luck. One of the parts I consider a highlight each year is watching the closing video. This year it seemed a little lack luster. Other than a few big names, I didn't see any familiar faces. I also don't remember seeing the video crew around much, other than at the Wallflower concert. After the conference was over we mingled around a bit then I took the company out to lunch. After lunch, two of the consultants headed to the airport, while the other three of us hung out at the condos till we needed to head out ourselves. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 08 Jun 2008 @ 09:30 || RSDC day 3 || WorkThis morning we started out listening to William Shatner. He is a good reader, ok ok, he's a good speaker too, but he was clearly phoning it in and reading a hacked up version of a speech he's giving before, with vague references to how software development is like making movies. It was an enjoyable talk and I hope they continue to get people of Mr. Shatner's caliber in the coming years.Around 2ish we broke down the booth, packed up and a few of us went back to the condo to take naps (we're getting old). Wednesday night is the special event. It's the time you get to go do something unusual with your industry peers. This year we were treated to Universal Studios. We've been to Universal's Islands of Adventure twice, but this was the first time to the other 1/2 of the theme park. We had season passes to Universal last year, so I'm fairly familiar with the park. The new attraction was the Simpson's ride. Which was outstanding. It's not exactly original, they revamped the Back to the future ride to make it into the Simpsons, while I'll miss the Back to the Future ride, the Simpsons ride is hands down just a better ride. It's was around 1:30 before we all got back to the condos to rest up for the last day. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Wed, 04 Jun 2008 @ 05:56 || RSDC day 2 || WorkSpent most of today speaking with other partners and some IBM folks. Only attended a few sessions in the morning. Hard to walk around the conference without getting side tracked to talk to someone every few feet.The ongoing theme of "Collaboration" was echoed very heavily in the key note. Grady's talk was fun as usually, with plenty of "Collaboration" mixed in. The pool party got rained out, we moved it to the lobby of the Swan hotel where most of the Disney staff were very helpful. Around 10:30 security shut us down for having the beer too close to the hotel. They were very nice about it, and we slowly shut down and packed things up ending the party about an hour early. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Tue, 03 Jun 2008 @ 05:12 || RSDC day 1 || WorkI'll briefly touch on the day here with more details for ReleaseTEAM employees in an email report, some of what I want to put here is under NDA.Breakfast isn't covered under NDA, so here goes. The group arrived around 7:30 at the hotel for breakfast, kinda woke up and wandered into the opening session. They had dancers (I think) dressed like the super heroes from the night before. IBM claimed 3500+ attendees, and this year I don't think they lied (well not as much as they usually do). They had the same lame comic this year, luckily his role was limited. Seems this year the word to wear out is "Collaboration", they must have used this word a hundred times at the Partner meeting and it was on every 3rd slide at the opening session. After the opening, we all went to the CM opening session, which about 50% of the conference did as well, they had us jammed into a smaller room (again, they made this mistake last year). They had to ask all the IBM folks to leave or to stand up, to make room for the attendees. The over all message was more new stuff to come, mostly tieing all the products into JAZZ. After these sessions we all went our different ways. I helped Beth set up the booth then headed to a session. At 5pm the expo center opened up and I spent most of my time wandering around talking to folks. Met the usual crowd and a ton of new folks. Beth and group had the booth covered, our model scanned almost 600 people in the 3 hours the booth was open. After the expo closed at 8:00 IBM had a concert, the Wallflowers, on the third floor. We stayed for most of that, then headed back to the condos, where I dropped asleep as soon as I hit the bed. Today will be another long one, our party ends around midnight.. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Mon, 02 Jun 2008 @ 05:01 || RSDC Partner day and VoiCE || WorkYesterday was a busy day. We left the condos at 7am, Beth and a consultant went to the Business Partner Meeting and another consultant and I went to VoiCE sessions.For the most part I stayed in the VoiCE session, but I snuck out twice and popped into the Partner meeting. The VoiCE sessions were very interesting, and we learned they do a 2 day VoiCE meeting each November in Boston. Not sure who I'm going to send for that, Elyse comes to mind but she doesn't like Boston. The Business Partner reception was on Sunday night for some reason, didn't make any sense, but it was packed and very well done. It started at 5 and went to 6:30, the main reception was in the other hotel and started at 6:00. After many drinks at the first one we meandered our way to the main reception which was also very well done. It had a kinda super hero theme, more like a super hero's secret identity theme, with actors walking around dressed as comic chars, "Release Manager" "The Developer" and other silly things. I don't think the majority of attendees got or cared about the theme. One of the spot lights on the main stage projected the phrase "R-TEAM" So we took pictures of Beth standing under it. Not sure if IBM knew they were kinda promoting us :) Got back to the condo's around 9ish, couple of us drank beers on the back porch, at 10 we got a show of the Sea World fireworks, kinda, lots of trees in the way, I think if we went down to the boat dock we'd have a good view of them, maybe will try that tomorrow night. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment Sun, 01 Jun 2008 @ 05:10 || Orlando || WorkGot into Orlando yesterday afternoon. Beth and I met up with one of my consultants and we checked into the resort. This place is very nice, I'm impressed. I wish we had been using resorts like this the past few years. This one is cheaper than the crappy hotels we had been staying at. It almost makes me want to look into timeshares myself, we got these condos via a time share trade via one of the consultants.We have 4, 2 bedroom condos for the week, at about 2/3 the price of 4 hotel rooms at a best western. We booked these a while ago when it wasn't clear how many of us would be attending the conference. I was still unsure if I was bringing the family again, and one of the consultants was planning on bring his wife. Turns out my kids didn't get out of school in time and his wife dislikes Orlando. So between the 4 condos we only have 5 people. We got lucky and all 4 condos are attached or next to each other, we have the two first floor and two second floor units on top of each other, the back porch of my condo has stairs down to the one below me and a cat walk to the one next to me, all enclosed in screening. 4 of us are here now, with the 5th flying in this afternoon. We went out for dinner at Landry's Seafood House, where I ordered a cheese burger. Afterwards we hit a liquor store and drank beers on the condo's back porch. I'm headed to the conference hotel in a few minutes to register and spend Sunday in the Partner meeting and a VoiCE session, I doubled booked myself, hopefully I can bounce between meetings. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 18 May 2008 @ 11:10 || Desk Quest || WorkLast weekend I went looking for new office furniture. I've been wanting to replace the desks in the office for a long time now, almost since I got them. The were dirt cheap and served the purpose, but they were always ugly. After two office moves they weren't looking any better.I wrote a quick perl script to look at craigslist rss feeds and set it up as a cron job. It scanned the three lists local to me, or at least were I wouldn't mind driving to pick up desks, and emailed me the results twice a day. After two days I thought I had hit the gold mine. From the ad, it seemed like someone was liquidating an small office, he claimed to have several desks, bookcases, and lots of other matching furniture. I set up a time to go look at them on Saturday. Saturday came and Shane, Sukki and I took my truck up to Longmont to check out the desks. Once up there, it turned out to be false advertisement. They had a bunch of stuff, but none of it matched, or was that great. It was only 9am in the morning, so I figured we could hit the Boulder farmers market on the way home, I had another two places I wanted to check out, but didn't have the addresses with me. The farmers market was pretty busy, even thou it was windy, we bought some things at Elyse's friends stand, onions and garlic I think, some really good bread, forget the names, from another vendor. Once back at the house, I got the addresses of the other two places and we took off again. The first place was a professional outfit called Office Liquidators. We found two desks that were in my budget, one for the sales office and one as a receptionist desk. They don't match but they were in real good condition and of decent quality. When I was paying for them, they mentioned they had a 2-3 week delivery backlog. Neither desk would fit into my truck. I told them to set up a delivery time anyway, but if I could find a bigger truck, I'd be back that day. I found a U-Haul not too far away and rented a moving van for 4 hours. We arrived back at the office place and had them load us up. The U-Haul was fun, it had three buckets seats, so it fit all of us. I was hoping to make Sukki ride in the back, but she fit into the child seat between the two adult seats. Didn't take us long to get to the office. We were lucky that all the desk pieces fit into the elevator. The office is only on the second floor, but the desks were pretty heavy, being able to use the elevator helped a lot. Took us longer to figure out how to get power to the new computer locations given the new desk layouts. I really dislike daisy chaining power strips, but we got everything configured well enough. In a couple hours were we back on the road to return the rental van, got there with about an hour to spare. I left some bailing twine and some folded boxes in the van, they tried to charge me a $20 cleaning fee. There was a dumpster not far from where I parked, I asked if I could just throw the stuff in the dumpster, they said sure, and waived the fee. Beth was very surprised when she got in the following Monday, and has since reconfigured the rest of her office to fit in with her new desk. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment Fri, 25 Apr 2008 @ 15:36 || Work and Torchwood || WorkPretty busy week. The first part of the week I was teaching classes, and the last two days I've been at a clients site fixing makefiles. Each night I've been going into the office till around 7, tonight I'm forcing myself not to. However, I'll probably be in the office most of the weekend.I haven't really had access to my site to post blogs during the day and I've not been interested in computers when I'm home. I have season two of Torchwood burnt to DVD, and plan on watching most of it tonight, finishing it up over the weekend, I've already seen the first two eps the last two nights. So far it's been pretty good. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Wed, 19 Mar 2008 @ 16:24 || Conferences || WorkI've been in Tampa this week exhibiting at a conference. You'd think standing around all day in an air condition room was easy work, it's probably better than being out on the highway patching asphalt in the glaring sun, but damn are my feet killing me.Conference is going well, lots of interest and lots of good contacts. Swag is improving and increasing. There were a few years where the swag was pretty lean. Must mean the tech industry is oblivious to the pending economical distasters the banks have lined up. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Thu, 28 Feb 2008 @ 16:35 || Tired || WorkMy employees made me walk during lunch today. I made it the first mile then went back to the office. Luckily they were walking around the block, which happens to be about a mile, so I was at the office when I gave up.link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 20 Jan 2008 @ 10:31 || busy weekend || WorkBeen working at a client site all weekend. Starting at 7am each day :(This happens from time to time, need to work when I can take systems down/offline and it's hard to schedule, clients often ask me to do come in late nights or over weekends. We got to a point where we needed to wait 16 hours for a copy to finish, so I was able to go home around 2pm yesterday, ended up heading to the casinos with Sukki. Was surprised how packed they were with the smoking ban in place. A little different crowd as well, more younger and attractive people, less old people on thier last lung. Today I should be able to get out of the clients offices around 1 pm. We have one last data store that failed to copy and it will probably take 12 hours. So I'll be driving back here late tonight, hopefully after the Amazing Race. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment Fri, 04 Jan 2008 @ 13:22 || Short Week || WorkThis week was only a two day work week for most of my company. I gave the office staff Mon-Weds off. I was going to work at a client site Weds with Elyse but wasn't feeling that great so stayed home.I was a little surprised at the number of people who called me on my cell phone Weds. While annoying, I hope it is an good omen for 2008. It will be nice to have another strong business year. The last two days I've spent taking care of minor things around the office. I've completed a database migration that we've been avoiding for the last 6 months. Patched up a failing server, was going to upgrade it, but after taking it all apart, cleaning and reseating things, it was behaving well while in my office. I rack mounted it back in the server room and it's misbehaving again :( I'll order the parts to overhaul it next week. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Tue, 11 Dec 2007 @ 13:33 || Crappy commute || WorkBeen working up in Boulder the last few weeks. This weekend we got snow. Been snowing on and off since then. Today I had to drive thru it to get to Boulder, lots of bad drivers out there didn't make it a fun drive. Yesterday the kids had doctors appointments that ran really late, so by the time I was finished it didn't make sense to brave the commute.It's nice having the F150 instead of the van for trips like this. I'm sure the van would have got me stuck in a snowbank somewhere. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Thu, 15 Nov 2007 @ 19:40 || Working late.... || WorkGoing to be a late one tonight. The VOB server at one of my clients crashed and is not coming back up. Luckily, I had just tested the backup/restore last week. Unluckily they have a ton of data, and restoring is going to take hours.Right now I'm hoping to get the disks back, looks like I've got the root partition fixed, only took 3 fsck's and 2 reboots. The 800G partition is now being fsck'ed, which is not going very fast, so I'll be here a few more hours at least. link to story || 3 comments || Add a comment Sat, 10 Nov 2007 @ 15:04 || Busy week || WorkBeen too busy to update the blog. This week we ran a seminar and it took all my spare time. All sorts of interesting stuff happened, but it's too work related to post about. For those who work with me, I'll catch them up next time we see each other, for the other slobs who read my ramblings, it went very well, but I'm not elaborating here.link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment |
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